Scott Horsley

Scott Horsley is a White House correspondent for NPR News. He reports on the policy and politics of the Obama Administration, with a special emphasis on economic issues.

The 2012 campaign is the third presidential contest Horsley has covered for NPR. He previously reported on Senator John McCain's White House bid in 2008 and Senator John Kerry's campaign in 2004. Thanks to this experience, Horsley has become an expert in the motel shampoo offerings of various battleground states.

Horsley took up the White House beat after serving as a San Diego-based business correspondent for NPR where he covered fast food, gasoline prices, and the California electricity crunch of 2000. He reported from the Pentagon during the early phases of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before joining NPR in 2001, Horsley was a reporter for member station KPBS-FM, where he received numerous honors, including a Public Radio News Directors' award for coverage of the California energy crisis.

Earlier in his career, Horsley worked as a reporter for WUSF-FM in Tampa, Florida, and as a news writer and reporter for commercial radio stations in Boston and Concord, New Hampshire. Horsley began his professional career as a production assistant for NPR's Morning Edition.

Horsley earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and an MBA from San Diego State University.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: President Obama says that even though his name isn't on the ballot in this year's presidential election, his legacy is. Obama is campaigning hard for Hillary Clinton all week. This afternoon, he was in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he warned supporters that many of his signature accomplishments could be undone if Donald Trump is elected president. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: All the...

Updated at 8:30 p.m. ET In a letter to several Democratic senators Monday, the Justice Department said it "will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible" regarding the review of thousands of newly discovered emails that may be relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server. The letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, came in response to four...

Hillary Clinton enters the homestretch of the presidential race with a sizable fundraising lead over Republican rival Donald Trump. Many GOP donors appear to have shifted their giving to down-ballot candidates for House and Senate. And Trump himself has contributed just over half the $100 million he pledged to help bankroll his own campaign. Finance reports filed Thursday show Clinton's campaign raised nearly twice as much money as Trump's in the first 19 days of October and had nearly four...

A newly revealed memo from a former aide to Bill Clinton details substantial overlap between donors to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and the former president's personal financial activities, a $30 million-plus enterprise described in the memo as "Bill Clinton, Inc." Money managers UBS and Barclays, mining giant BHP, and the for-profit educational company Laureate International Universities each made substantial payments to Bill Clinton for speeches or "advisory services," while also...

Imagine for a moment that it's Jan. 21, 2017. After a chilly inauguration the day before, the parades and festivities have ended. And the new president of the United States is ready for his or her first day of work. "What follows is my 100-day action plan to make America great again," Donald Trump told supporters in Gettysburg, Pa., last weekend. "First I will announce my intention to totally renegotiate NAFTA, one of the worst deals our country has ever made." Trump also promised to withdraw...

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump seized on rising health insurance premiums Tuesday as evidence that "Obamacare is just blowing up." But the general manager of a Trump golf course in Florida corrected his boss for suggesting that Trump's own employees would be personally affected. "All of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare," Trump told reporters during an appearance at the National Doral Golf Club in Miami. "What they're going through with their health...

Psy-ops in the guest box continues at the third and final presidential debate. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both using guest tickets in a calculated effort to rattle their rivals, or at least send a signal to voters watching on TV. The in-your-face guest list includes two billionaire critics of Trump, the mother of a Benghazi victim, and President Obama's Kenya-born half-brother. Trump invited Malik Obama to sit in his silent cheering section after the president's relative endorsed...

Live by the leak, and you may die by the leak. That's the message Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is sending to his fellow Republicans, as he swears off using campaign material that originates with WikiLeaks. "Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us," Rubio said in a statement. "I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks," added Rubio, who is up for re-election. "As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign...

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine spoke to a church group in Miami over the weekend. That wouldn't be remarkable except that he spoke entirely in Spanish — a first for a candidate on a major-party ticket. "Yo soy cristiano, un católico" ("I'm a Christian, a Catholic") Kaine told parishioners at Pneuma Church at the beginning of his five-minute speech. Kaine described his background working as a missionary in Honduras, where he said he learned lessons about faith, family...

First lady Michelle Obama joined students from across the country Thursday in picking produce from the White House garden. It's the last such harvest of the Obama era. But the first lady has taken steps to ensure the garden — and the bumper crop of publicity and goodwill it generated — won't disappear once she and her husband leave the White House. The W. Atlee Burpee home gardening company and The Burpee Foundation have contributed $2.5 million to the National Park Foundation to maintain the...

Social Security alone consumes nearly a quarter of the federal budget. At this week's vice presidential debate, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence spoke about how the administrations they hope to join would deal with the challenges facing safety net programs like it. Social Security The Challenge Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, in which benefits for retirees and others are largely funded through the payroll taxes collected from current...

We don't really know what Donald Trump paid in taxes, because unlike every other major presidential candidate in the last four decades, the GOP nominee has refused to release his tax returns. But the New York Times offers a tantalizing theory that Trump could have legally escaped income tax liability on hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to staggering losses from two decades ago. That he could have done so while still enjoying a lavish lifestyle is testament to both the...

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump renewed his attacks on a former Miss Universe winner Friday, heedless of the possible fallout with women and Latino voters. In a series of tweets posted around 5 a.m. ET, Trump criticized Alicia Machado as "my worst Miss U." and described her as "disgusting." Machado, who is now a telenovela actress, burst into political headlines during Monday's presidential debate , when Hillary Clinton described the way Trump had criticized the beauty contestant...

The Arizona Republic has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president — the first time the newspaper has backed a Democrat in its history. The Republic's editorial board writes that Clinton understands what the position demands: "a steady hand, a cool head, and the ability to think carefully before acting." And it pointedly concludes that her Republican rival, Donald Trump, does not. The newspaper acknowledged serious missteps by Clinton, including her use of a personal email...